


Hurricane Drunk

by Kurukami



Series: The Jaegerfly Effect [1]
Category: Firefly, Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Death, Nightmares, Other, PTSD, knowing the characters gives away the twist, tangential fic, the author totally blames quigonejinn and saellys for this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-26
Updated: 2013-10-26
Packaged: 2017-12-30 14:05:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1019525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kurukami/pseuds/Kurukami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two siblings volunteer for the Jaeger Academy.  Together they pass the strenuous physical and mental examinations, learn to fight in ways they’d barely imagined; together they excel in battle-simulations against virtual kaiju.  Together, in time, they pilot the Jaeger that becomes known as Gipsy Danger.</p>
<p>Becket is not their surname.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hurricane Drunk

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Heroes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1011219) by [hauntedjaeger (saellys)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger), [quigonejinn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn). 



Two siblings, both remarkably talented, pulled out of the lives they might have lived by the horrors of the kaiju attacks: the first in San Francisco in 2013, then Manila six months later, then Cabo San Lucas, Sydney... 

Two siblings, one still a minor, one just beginning what might have been a promising career.

Together they volunteer for the Jaeger Academy. Together they pass the strenuous physical and mental examinations, learn to fight in ways they’d barely imagined; together they excel in battle-simulations against virtual kaiju. Together, in time, they pilot the Jaeger that becomes known as Gipsy Danger.

Becket is not their surname.

In 2017, Knifehead emerges from the Breach and –

: : : : : :

“No, _no!_ You couldn’t possibly have—“

“I wish I was lying!” He grins at the woman sitting next to him, their limbs intertwined, her feet resting comfortably, familiarly, in his lap. “No shit, there we were, and… well, we’d all just made Ranger. That was it. We were the elite. The world was ours to defend, you know?”

“So, wait, you had to be naked?”

“Naked. Yes. And, uh, on top of the statue of St. George.” He bites his lip and looks at her consideringly. “Can you just picture me?”

The woman gets a sly smile on her face, drags a foot up his chest, replies with a wink. “Naked, hmmm, let’s see, I’m going to have to conjure up a … yeah, that’s gonna be hard.”

He shakes his head, holding back laughter.

“So, did the authorities come?”

“Mmm, nope, there were no Feds.” At her disbelieving expression, he adds: “Until I started singing.”

She cracks up laughing, unable to restrain her giggling. “Oh my god, _no,_ what did you _sing?_ ”

“This, this is not funny!” The huge grin on his face belies his words completely. “This is a morality tale about the evils of sake in Honolulu.”

As one, both of them turn and stare right at you. Mirth falls away. Half his face has been torn away and he says, “I would be there right now, if you hadn’t let me die.”

You wake up screaming.

: : : : : :

In 2017, Knifehead emerges from the Breach and heads straight for the Alaskan coastline. Gipsy Danger successfully intercepts the kaiju, but though Knifehead is mortally wounded –

: : : : : :

Something’s wrong with you. That much is obvious to anyone with eyes, and it’s not just the physical scars left by the fight off the coast of Anchorage or what you forced yourself to do to get to safety. No, it’s clearly much more than that, and you know it, know it by the flickers of seeming familiarity you keep catching out of the corner of your eye. You keep thinking you see him while you’re awake, know you see him in the few ragged hours of sleep you can manage each night.

Almost nothing seems to push back that sense of tense, desperate helplessness. The meds do little but put you into an apathetic haze, so you lean on them as little as possible. For a while sex does the job – pushing all that tension and stress and might-have-beens and never-weres into one tight, compact ball that you let drain away with the warm quivering flood of sensation that comes with orgasm. It works until it doesn’t, when one day you feel knocked over sideways with the intensity of the orgasm that just washed through you… and the tension just doesn’t go along with it.

That’s when the nightmares start drawing close again, dreams of _him_ , of torn metal and screaming and the stink of the sea. That, and the fact that waking up you broke the nose of whoever the hell was in your bed that night, is when you start drinking more and fucking less, because it's bad enough being _fang zong feng kuang de jie_ without screwing up everyone else nearby.

It’s also when you start seriously thinking about leaving the Corps.

: : : : : :

In 2017, Knifehead emerges from the Breach and heads straight for the Alaskan coastline. Gipsy Danger successfully intercepts the kaiju, but though Knifehead is mortally wounded it still manages to tear your brother from the Conn-Pod. He dies while you’re still in-Drift with him, and the resulting backlash, well…

: : : : : :

Although you managed to pilot the crippled Gipsy Danger back to shore, barely, you are never quite the same afterward. The burns from the overloaded circuitry of the drivesuit are the least of it. You have the damnable horrific nightmares, and keep losing yourself in thoughts of what might have been, haunted by the memories of your brother. You leave the Pan Pacific Defense Corps behind barely a few months later, doing your best to lose yourself in manual work and drinking and the occasional brawl after-hours.

After the first year or so, nobody on the Wall’s crews or anywhere nearby is dumb enough to start shit with you. Everyone knows not to bother the lean young woman with the drivesuit scars; especially not after a trio of drunk locals tried to “have a little fun” with what looked like a inebriated coed and ended up in the hospital with a multitude of bruises and fractures. 

The Wall’s crews travel the edges of the Pacific, laboring at building the wall that’s meant to shield the nations of humanity. You cling to that labor; more than occasionally, you count on exhaustion do the job that meds can’t. You work twelve-, sixteen-hour days on the Wall, pushing yourself to lengths that many won’t, moving atop I-beams hundreds of feet in the air with calm fearlessness and a dancer’s grace. Respected for your abilities and your drive, others start treating you as though you might be some kind of lucky talisman, like an albatross maybe, even though you know people think you might be some kind of crazy.

It’s five years on the Wall before Marshall Derrial Book comes looking for you. Time enough for memory to scab over, time enough that when he flies in by helicopter and finds you in Anchorage after your workshift’s ended, asking if you want another chance at being a Jaeger pilot, that you don’t turn him down flat.

: : : : : :

“Things have changed, Ms. Tam,” Book says. “Haven’t you heard? The world is coming to an end. The question is this, River: do you want to die here, working on a Wall that won’t stop the threat? Or at the helm of a Jaeger?”

On the flight to Hong Kong you sleep straight through for the better part of eleven hours, and whatever dreams you have you can’t recall.

**Author's Note:**

> This work would not exist were it not for "Heroes", co-written by quigonejinn and saellys. Although I loved both Pacific Rim and Firefly, I never had thought of crossing the two until that astounding fic came along and turned my preconceptions on their head. My brain started racing around thinking "So how did they get there? What caused all that? Was the kaiju invasion why mankind had to leave Earth-that-Was behind, since the Breach must have eventually reopened? Given that NASA's budget in 2013 was $16.8 billion and each Jaeger costs close to $100 billion to manufacture per the Wiki, what kind of space exploration and colonization program could be financed if some of that budget was diverted from Jaegers and obviously useless Wall-building? And if our awesome Pacific Rim characters are busy manning a Firefly in the 26th century, what happens if we put Firefly characters in Jaeger-related positions in the 21st?"
> 
> Title comes from the song by Florence & The Machine.
> 
> fang zong feng kuang de jie – Chinese, “a knot of self-indulgent lunacy”


End file.
